Keep it Simple: Home economics - an abundance of apples

There were some odd forces at work this past week compelling me to try and put to use the harvest from every apple on our two Macintosh trees.

For years, mid-August has been the time of maturity for the Macintosh trees I planted just east of the house almost four decades ago. We get our fill of fresh apples, then freeze bags of slices for winter pies, make applesauce and butter, and occasionally dry a batch of slices in the dehydrator. A bumper crop year finds some of the crop we don’t use either going to waste or given to friends and relatives.

Last year, though, you may recall, if you have any fruit trees, was a major disaster across Michigan. A late April cold snap wreaked havoc on most of the state’s fruit trees, wiping out more than 90 percent of the 2012 apple crop statewide.

Although I didn’t grow up during the Great Depression, I nonetheless haul around this idea of a subsistence farming mentality — especially when it comes to putting to use the summer bounty from our garden.

Last year’s scarcity of apples for sauce and other apple-related uses left me this year with an unreasonable subsistence desire, itching at me to use each and every apple from this year’s Macintosh bounty.

After turning half a bushel of the red beauties into a lovely pink applesauce and freezing enough quart-sized bags of apple slices for quick wintertime desserts, I turned my attention to drying the remainder of our Mac crop — hence the subsistence mentality pervading my week of the apple.

Most years, if time allows, we might dry a batch of apples for a “fun” side apple project during harvest. Some of the resulting “fun” is added to my wife’s famous (in my unbiased opinion) homemade granola which contains just about every known healthy seed, nut and dried fruit imaginable.

I was determined this week to turn the remainder of our apple crop — about a bushel and a half, or 75 pounds of sweet juiciness — into dried apples. What we will do with all those dried apples beyond adding to several batches of granola and the occasional handful enjoyed with an afternoon cup of coffee, is anyone’s guess. If you have any ideas feel free to contact me.

According to the Web site Nuts.com, I can order a 1-pound bag of dried apples for $5.99 or a bag of organic dried apples for $8.99 a pound. As I have never sprayed or done anything else of a chemical nature to my trees, I would then put the value of my dried apples slices at around $9 a pound.

This week, I discovered one dehydrator batch of apples yielded exactly 1 pound of product. How convenient.

Was it worth the time and effort to pick, wash, slice and dehydrate my own dried apples worth $9 a batch/pound as opposed to hitting the “add to cart” and “order” buttons on the Nuts.com Web site? Not likely, if viewed from strictly a consequence of economic value.

When I was a gainfully employed full-time staff writer at the Herald Times I could earn, in less than an hour, enough greenbacks to buy a 1-pound bag of organic dried apples from Nuts.com.

Viewed from a personal subsistence value, though, the work is immeasurably worth the effort. It’s like harvesting a row of green beans for canning — not to mention the earlier planting and weeding involved. Neither activity is really worth the effort from an economic standpoint for most people.

Unless of course you value the knowledge and satisfaction of knowing exactly where your food came from and how it was grown, harvested and “put up” for use in the coming year.